O P I N I O N S

Guest column
Evoke fear in criminals, not law-abiding citizens
RK Raghavan
No right thinking person would suggest the police should abjure violence. What is proposed is a show of force only to prevent or control group misbehaviour or in apprehending a fleeing felon.

Touchstones
The castaways of age
Ira Pande
In family after family, the old and infirm are now increasingly driven to lonely lives. They are lucky if they can afford caregivers, but otherwise they can die without anyone discovering their deaths until neighbours alert the police.

Ground zero
Why Manmohan should have invited Ashraf to lunch
Raj Chengappa
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made an ‘I have a dream’ type of speech concerning foreign policy during his first term when he said in 2007 that he looked forward to a day “when one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul.”

Guest column
Evoke fear in criminals, not law-abiding citizens
RK Raghavan

No right thinking person would suggest the police should abjure violence. What is proposed is a show of force only to prevent or control group misbehaviour or in apprehending a fleeing felon.

RK Raghavan

Two Punjab policemen were recently caught on camera beating up a hapless woman on the streets of Tarn Taran. Reports say she had actually sought police help against harassment by some truck drivers, and what she got by way of service was horrendous. The use of force on her, so vividly captured by an amateur camera, was unpardonable, even if there had actually been some provocation from the victim.

The police defence is that her relatives had misbehaved with them. Not many are, however, willing to buy this version. This episode came close on the heels of a police lathicharge on a group of protesting teachers in Patna, and pictures showed no provocation whatsoever for the police action. The apex court has taken suo motu cognizance of both occurrences.

Police atrocities are a common occurrence.

Whatever be the legal outcome, the citizen may not be satisfied because he is so convinced that rudeness and misbehavior are part and parcel of police demeanour and little can be done to alter this. While the disdain for rights was obvious from the Tarn Taran episode, what was more galling was total gender insensitivity. Was women police not available in the vicinity to take care of the individual, just in case she was in fact indulging in some objectionable conduct? Even if they weren’t, was there not time enough to summon them to handle her, particularly because there could not have been any great and imminent danger to peace from a single woman.

Unfortunately, there is something wrong in their psyche that the police misbehaves and uses force at the drop of a hat. I am not talking here of how the police handles group violence. My reference is only to police brutality upon individuals, be it crime suspects or plain citizens.

How do you explain the police propensity to resort routinely to physical maltreatment of those with whom they interact? Why do indecorous episodes involving the police get reported ever so often from some part or the other across the globe? Here police chronicles are littered with some eminently forgettable happenings.

The one that comes readily to my mind is the infamous Rodney King episode of 1991 in which a group of white policemen of Los Angeles beat up an African-American motorist just because he did not stop when asked to. This was racism at its worst, and Rodney King has become a metaphor for the prejudice that the American Police carries in some regions of that country. While two of the delinquent policemen were eventually punished, the other two were let off due to paucity of evidence. Here again it was a video clipping that clinched the issue.

More recently, police brutality showed up starkly from a picture (carried by local English daily) where a citizen was seen being dragged along a road in Johannesburg suburbs after being cuffed on to a police vehicle. The victim was a 27-year-old taxi driver from Mozambique, whose only fault was that he parked his car on the wrong side of the road! He was later found dead in a police cell with bloody injuries. (According to Amnesty International there were more than 700 deaths in police custody in South Africa during 2012).

This incident caused so much outrage in the nation that some believed the police under Apartheid was better behaved! This was one instance where race did not seem to matter to a police force, which is now mostly Black.

No right thinking person would for a moment suggest that the police should totally abjure violence. What is proposed here is a show of force only at appropriate times to prevent or control group misbehaviour or in apprehending a fleeing felon from whom there is an immediate prospect of violence at innocent passersby. The law permits this. What is not recommended, however, is the show of authority coupled with physical assault on individuals who were either innocent or had deviated from law at the cost of fellow citizens. (Unfortunately some of the ‘encounter’ deaths reported by our policemen belong to this category, and they are being rightly investigated on court orders). The task of neutralising solitary offenders or suspects acting alone is different from putting down a collective threat to order in society.

It is an open secret that the police tendency to resort to illegal conduct is often the result of permissiveness encouraged by their political bosses or departmental superiors themselves. This is what requires to be curbed in a democracy. Failure to do so, on the mistaken belief that only an unorthodox police force could be expected to deliver goods, spells disaster. We need to foster a police force that is feared by the underworld and is respected by the law-abiding citizen. I am not sure whether this is happening in India. — The writer is a former CBI Director

Touchstones
The castaways of age
Ira Pande

In family after family, the old and infirm are now increasingly driven to lonely lives. They are lucky if they can afford caregivers, but otherwise they can die without anyone discovering their deaths until neighbours alert the police.

Ira Pande

Nirbhaya’s brave struggle is now an international cause celebre. On March 8, when we celebrated International Women’s Day, her story came first to one’s mind as one considered how wretchedly we have all failed to protect our daughters against the bestial behaviour of certain men. When even the daughter of the Chief Minister of Delhi feels unsafe on the Capital’s streets, what is there left to hope?

However, even though women have a legitimate reason to come out vocally and be heard (perhaps for the first time with some degree of seriousness), what about some other sections of society that are equally vulnerable? Take the case of elderly parents. Until a few decades ago, the joint family made it unnecessary for old people to be homeless or uncared for. Even widows, childless couples and single women were taken in generously into the bosom of a nurturing extended family. I can recall several such loving aunts and uncles who descended each winter to our home in the plains to escape the winter cold of our native regions. Holi and Divali were the markers of this annual migration: they came soon after Divali and left soon after Holi. Summers were spent in the old family homes where everyone had visiting rights. All this has changed radically in the last few years. I find myself surrounded by elderly parents whose children have migrated abroad and abandoned them. For a few years, they travel back and forth (mostly to help out the young couple to bring up their babies) but when old age and infirmity make that impossible, I see them sitting in a forlorn way in parks or shuffling around in markets. It is a heart-rending sight. Some NGOs (Agewell for one) is trying to take care but naturally their reach is limited to urban areas.

We are in the throes of a massive social shift and, once again, globalisation can be held responsible for altering our social structures and kinship patterns in favour of the young and impatient. Old people take longer to adjust, longer to understand and many have felt left behind because they are not computer-savvy. Virtually no one writes letters any longer and emails are, by their very language patterns, a means of communicating information, not love and compassion. I often wonder what will happen to future generations of biographers when there are no longer handwritten letters to scour and decipher.

I was recently sent a piece by a poet friend who has written feelingly of his mother and the cruelty he saw unleashed on his parents by his older brother (who lives abroad) as he tried to drive them out of their family home. His aged father, struck with Alzheimer’s and unable to defend his rights, was done in by this person’s greed as he bullied their mother into signing off their share to him. Both the parents died heartbroken, in a sense killed by their own child’s indifference. In virtually every such case, parents are too timid to take on their own children (fearing endless lawsuits or-worse-social censure). Yet, in family after family, the old and infirm are now increasingly driven to lonely lives. They are lucky if they can afford caregivers, but otherwise they can die without anyone discovering their deaths until neighbours alert the police.

India may have been a poor country compared to the developed economies of the West but we were able to proudly say that we care for our families in a more humane way than most such ‘prosperous’ countries. This is no longer true: we have forgotten the best of our own cultural legacy and imported the worst (like the viral Congress grass that came here with PL-480 wheat) from the West. As long as we continue to assess ourselves on the basis of GDPs and incomes, this will never be addressed. Perhaps it is time to look at the Gross Human Happiness Index, as in Bhutan. Poverty and happiness have a positive relationship, for the poorest countries are also the ones that treat their old people better. Look around you: your helpers have more cousins and brothers and sisters who look after them than we do. It is a thought worth considering, Mr Chidambaram.

* * *

Suddenly, Sufi-ism has become the flavour of the day in Delhi. The irony is that the more intolerant we become of each other’s religious presence, the more liberal Sufi-ism is celebrated. In one fortnight, we had two important festivals held in Delhi: Muzaffar Ali’s Jahan-e-Khusro (the pioneer in this area) and the Aga Khan Trust’s celebration of Amir Khusrau (same person, different spelling) and his mystic poetry at the newly restored Nizamuddin Basti. I can understand Sufi as a form of poetry and the tradition of dargah qawwalis, but what on earth is Sufi kathak? National and international artistes from across Asia and even North Africa were invited as Delhi’s chatterati (who probably don’t understand Urdu, leave alone Persian) swayed and clapped to these new-age rock shows. By the way, have you noticed how Bombay films are now almost mandated to include at least one Sufi ‘item’ in their narratives?

If all this leads to wider tolerance and liberality, to better understanding of women and marginalised groups, more power to them. But if they are merely cosmetic devices to draw in crowds and sway people’s emotions, then we are in danger of trivialising what is possibly the noblest strain of our syncretic culture.